"You mean Leareth's project there, that went, er, messily? Some, I helped out a bit with the cleanup." 

<Can we do that. On the Blade ship. We don't have Leareth and we may have underestimated their capabilities. But I think if we summon demons to eat every living thing on the ship that will likely suffice.>

The mage blinks, startled. He licks his lips. "We, um - yes, probably? Leareth deactivated the artifact but - I think we could just do it with mages and regular summoning spells." He looks down. "It'd kill whoever volunteered for the summoning, probably." 

<I understand that is a difficult thing to ask of anyone but if we are lucky everyone in Leareth's base is dead and we do not know how they were found. If I get a volunteer now how long until we can do it.>

The mage bites his lip. "You'll - get volunteers. People know what war is, and - Leareth..." 

(This particular mage is not cleared to know about Leareth's immortality.) 

"It'll need to be someone who knows demon summoning, not everyone does, I don't really. But we're ready on the Gate." Gulp. "Pretty much. I think." 

He steps back and addresses all the mages. <We lost contact with Leareth's base. We think they are dead or captured. We do not know how they were found. We need a plan that is faster and has less potential to fall apart if we meet more sophisticated resistance than expected. I propose that we summon demons onto the Blade ship and step onto it only once every living thing on it is dead. This will likely have lower casualties in total but I need a volunteer, who will likely not survive.>

There's a ten-second pause while everyone absorbs that. 

He gets volunteers. Several. They think to be safe they should have several summoners, and the summoners need someone to shield them while they get the spell up, but they'll have more than enough volunteers.

Okay. He thinks they should do it right now. 

It takes the two mages planning to do the Gate a couple minutes to get themselves settled and ready, and for the others to line up. 

Now? 

Yes. (Even if they die after this, it'll slow the invasion down to have the Blade ship gone, it'll buy a little more space for -)

- how could things have gone so badly wrong at the other base, he can barely imagine -

It takes a couple of minutes and it's exhausting for the mages in question, but the Gate goes up - the final stage fast, so there's no time to blast it - not much time–

There are people in the conference room with weapons trained on the spot where the small Gate opened, even though they don't know for sure that there was anything in particular about this room - someone tried to get a message to the new magic-user-controller asking about how Gate targeting worked but she hadn't known either, had in fact thought that you had to have been there before -

They see the threshold of the door glow and they spin around and try shooting at it -

They are almost but not quite fast enough - the Gate is up and three mages burst through, shields fully up and also wearing multiple shield-talismans, and look around for anything that needs fire thrown at it while the three volunteer summoners creep in behind them, also as shielded as possible. 

The Gate goes down the second they're through. No point risking any more than that. 

The soldiers standing there with weapons drawn have just enough time to realize that they need their dracon beams on the 'punch through steel' settings you're not supposed to use aboard your own ship if they want to stop heavily shielded mages and not enough time to act on this realization. 

Alarms are blaring. Elsewhere on the ship heavy steel doors are crashing into place to segregate ship segments so whatever the enemy is doing they hopefully can't get out the part of the ship they're in. 

Seconds later there are so many demons! They have a binding to only go forward from the door, which should at least stop them from eating their summoners right away and to only stay for an hour - probably that's enough to eat everyone on the ship, or at least most of them, and the others won't be able to come back to it again until later. 

They get a message off to Visser 3, from one of the far corners of the ship. They have good video surveillance of their ship so they can watch in detail as people die horribly to demons and watch and wait to see if the demons are able to get through the emergency ship segmentation.

The demons certainly try but it takes them a while to hack at the steel. One of the bodyguards is a Farseer and has time to realize this, and they do a Gate and shove one of the summoners through. 

- the demons in this part are hungry, they've eaten all the easy targets, and the shielded ones aren't easy but they are there, and the binding isn't really that strong. 

It takes a while for them to get through the shields but they do, eventually, and then no more new demons are arriving anymore. There are plenty already here. 

Since the steel slows them down there is plenty of time to see if other things also slow them down. 

Some of the other things tried punch right through the walls of your spaceship and into open vacuum but is that, really, a worse way to die?

This does suck all the nearby demons out into vacuum too and then they're not left to keep rampaging through the ship, at least. 

Visser 3 responds with instructions and with borrowed time the ship's engineers rush to try to carry them out. And they evacuate everybody they can.

He paces. He can't do anything until the demons are gone, and they'll have to move quickly once they are. The most important next target is the Pool ship. It will be forewarned - this was slow, there'd have been time to get some messages off - but the Blade ship has better weaponry than the Pool ship and it's faster and it should be able to achieve this. And then - 

- destroy the pools on Earth and it might be over...

Did the Farseers see anything at the surface of the base where Leareth was.

They saw - equipment? Looks like this. They're not sure what it's for. There's no crater or anything. 

It does look like there are some helicopters around? The kind that hospitals have, when ambulances aren't fast enough. 

Tail-lash. 

<Someone should Gate in and Final Strike.>

There are flinches. Then nods. 

...Uh, none of them have the Gate location already, that was the entire point, but one of the Farseers looking right now is a mage and could Gate to the surface. They'll be so visible but, well, Final Strikes don't take long. 

Will a Final Strike at the surface even kill the prisoners who were incapacitated down inside the mine. If not, he has pictures of all the locations locked in a fashion where he and Cayaldwin (at the third camp) can collectively unlock them.